Monster post. Need to finish up SF ....
So let's start with a picture at sunset from outside my door. San Francisco has some of the nicest lighting late in the afternoon, which I usually failed to take advantage of, but this is a pretty typical image of the housing available in the area in which I lived.
Last time I posted, we were allll the way back on the weekend of October 25th in Santa Cruz and San Jose. The following weekend, my parents were kind enough to visit the city (it's my dad's favorite) and naturally, we had the worst weather of the my entire time there. It rained 24/7 for 4 days straight. But we tried to make the best of it. My parents did a lot of shopping (Milwaukee leaves much to be desired) and I got to walk around some of the nicer parts of town that I hadn't spent much time in. We also had three amazing meals, the first with the McKenzies where it was great to be able to catch up and thank them for their incredible hospitality. The restaurants, namely the Boulevard, La Folie, and Gary Denko, served some of the best food I've had in my life. Mack and Beeler: we have a future date in SF to hit up those restaurants. Finally, we made our way up to Sausalito to have a quick walk around some interesting boating and art/photography shops.
Here's a picture of my dad and I waiting for the Sausalito ferry to head out at the Embarcadero:
So that's that weekend. The following weekend was much busier. Saturday morning was the telecast of the Williams-Amherst football game at Jillian's bar where I met up with some older alums (there was a huge gap between the really young alums and the next generation that was there, which was closer to being '00 or '01s) as well as Matt Gustafson and Eugene Berson '08s and Mike Davitian '07. Afterwards, we headed out to the farmer's market at the Embarcadero since no one other than myself had been there. They also had this sweet mushroom festival that I had been really excited for, but ended up being much smaller than I thought (just a few booths, but some really cool shrooms, look below):
These are king trumpets, very solid, thick stems that you can grate like cheese or cut into smaller pieces:
Pink tree oyster mushrooms:
Misc:
Other farmers market pictures:
Flavored sugar, anyone?
Blue Bottle drip coffee:
A typical J Stone dinner. Pasta with mushrooms, shrimp, scallops, broccoli, and tomato in a white sauce (I actually made red sauces more often). A wonderful salad beforehand (greens, avocado, tomato, cucumber, and hearts of palm).
The next day, I headed across the Golden Gate Bridge ....
to eventually end up at the top of
Mount Tam (short for Tamalpais), which is the highest point near SF. I hiked with a guy that I worked with named Chris and one of his friends whose name is escaping me.
A view to the northeast:
Lunch near the top: turkey, ham, cheese, and avocado on tasty bread. Chris is the guy on the right, and you can see Mount Diablo (which I will show you pictures of soon) off in the distance in the left.
Perhaps the only evidence that I was actually in SF (Diablo on the left, SF on the right, Mill Valley below):
Salamander?
A view to the north:
A decent view of SF -- on the far left you can see the city:
The hike didn't take nearly as long as we thought it would, so we headed down to Mill Valley, got some food and coffee, and drove to
Muir Beach, pictures below:
So that was a damn busy weekend, but I got a lot of stuff that I wanted to do before I left done. The next weekend, I took the Bart out to Dublin where I met up with Matty G, his friend Becca (whom I had already met), and her brother Sam (whom I had not met). We had this great plan to climb all the way up Mount Diablo, which is in the east bay area, in an 8 mile loop. I managed to get us off to a poor start. The previous night I had gone out with Mike Davitian, who had the opportunity to show off his new apartment in Marina. After walking home, I must've set my alarm for an hour later than I had intended, resulting in my being about 20 min late to the Bart station. From there, Matt drove us on a slightly different road than planned (we were supposed to find a trailhead on the northern side of the mountain, but we weren't quite there yet). Anyways, we ended up near a trail that was probably about 2 miles long each way but got us to the top. Pictures from the way up:
At the top:
A view west. You can see the end of whatever mountain range this is, then some flatness, and then the beginning of the Sierras waaay in the distance:
A bug?
The way to lunch:
Going down:
Some people had wanted to see where I was living, so this is a picture of my room. Not much there, since it wasn't worth investing in. Usually wasn't that messy.
I'll be catching up to now sometime in the next few days. Leaving for Chile in a couple weeks!
Hope everyone had a great holiday and a happy new year.
Mid December, the family headed down to Costa Rica for a nice warm vacation in lieu of a crazy dangerous vacation to Asia. We traveled to a few different beaches on the Pacific coast, namely near the Manuel Antonio National Park and the Papagayo Peninsula, both of which were terrific. Mid-80s every day without a cloud in the sky. Here are some pictures of the wildlife in the area (it was dark a lot of the time, so pictures in general didn't turn out so great):
Some crazy leaf footed bug (order hemiptera, family coreidae), still need to find a book on where to get species:
We also briefly visited the Monteverde cloud forest area, as well as the Arenal volcano, both of which were awesome but far more touristy than I remember from high school. Overall, sweet trip.
